You might imagine that the DNA in your cells has a simple history. Even though it’s been recombined in every generation through sex and gained the occasional mutation, on the whole the genome has been stable and has been passed down reliably from your ancestors. But that’s not the entire story. Nearly half of your genome is a wild drama: mobile, repetitive, disruptive, even viral. Source You might imagine that the DNA in your cells has a simple history. Even though it’s been recombined ...

Joint Indo-US discovery of water and hydroxyl across the Moon’s surface by the Chandrayaan 1 orbiter, prominently highlighted as blue and violet on this reflected infrared radiation map. Individual images: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Brown University / ISRO / TeamIndus | Graphic: Jatan Mehta 17 years ago this week, a paper published in Science announced the discovery of water on the Moon by India’s Chandrayaan 1 orbiter. Changing the notion of a bone-dry Moon as cemented during the Apoll...

I stand at the bookshelves — art and Nature and biography and memoir — and ask myself what story I want to tell. What do I want to write? What I do know is I want to write something. And so I begin. ⁂ ⁂ ⁂ My adventure began with zines. I packed four zines to read: three pocket-sized that had been kindly sent by a friend, and one folded, A3-sized zine that I had purchased at the weekend. The reading material got me through the wee hours of the morning, food for thought after break...

Soap Bubbles by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at AirBnB’s housing accelerator, rising steel prices, a resurgence of US coal power, low-head dams, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities Halina Bennet on what she’s learned from a year of covering housi...

“System One” models like Jev are fast general classifiers. Classifiers have existed since 1958 , but they have to be trained for specific tasks: if you build a classifier to identify images of dogs, it can’t be used to tell you if a streetlight is red, or if a letter is urgent. Like a LLM, Jev can be prompted for a wide variety of tasks, from sorting email to playing Doom . I think models like this are going to be important. There are many tasks that a LLM could do in theory but ...

I'm back from VCF Midwest 21 , arguably the largest vintage computer festival on the planet. After being blown away last year, I decided to get a table of my own this year, to demonstrate NTP Time on a bunch of old Macs, representing every era up to the pinnacle of the PowerPC, an Xserve G5 (serving duty as a Stratum 2 ntpd server). Attending as an exhibitor is a lot different. In some ways better (I got to interact face-to-face with at least 200 people—after that I ran out of ...

Hello, Join the huddle, while I regale you with more tales of the Penguin... Factorio on the Steam Frame raiguard When Valve originally announced their next-gen hardware , I was very excited for the Steam Controller and marginally excited for the Steam Machine, but I wasn't very excited about the Steam Frame. I have had the opportunity to play VR on my friend's HTC Vive; and on the occasions where I visit the Wube office in Prague, I have played on the company's Valve In...

I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI and LLM technology. I’m fascinated by its effect on our profession, excited by the potential gains in productivity - and thus the products we could rapidly build. On the other hand, I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure, designing bio weapons. But, back on my first hand, LLMs might also design miracle cures, and come up with clever ways to raise our prosperity. Fundamentally I don’t...

I've always made the :visited attribute for hyperlinks look the same as links that haven't been visited, and it seems that it's the default behaviour across the web. I've never really given it much thought, until I actually used :visited in anger. My feed reader of choice, Miniflux uses the :visited attribute properly, making visited links purple. When reading posts from the hundreds of blogs I follow via RSS, I find it really useful to see if I've already visited a link within a pos...

Aviation came to Denver mainly in the form of mail. Like much of the inland West, the first airfields served a smattering of passenger flights (both expensive and uncomfortable in the 1930s) and a regular schedule of contract mail carriers. Postal Service air mail contracts built many of the nation's major airlines—and its major airports. One of Denver's simple airstrips, Denver Municipal Airport, transformed from a mail stop to a busy airport when Continental Airlines moved its headquarters t...

The following conversation is fictional. --------------------------- ALICE: (Looking over a student's record.) Hmm, let's see. She wants to work in quantum computing. She's had the year-long quantum sequence in the physics department and has taken a course in quantum computing in the computer science department. She has done a project in quantum computing in an REU program.  Grades good, letters good. I think we should admit her. BOB: Wait! Did she get a minor in Physics? This is very important...

The past year has been exciting for w64devkit, which like any software distribution is never complete. Peter0x44 joined as co-maintainer, and has pushed the project in good, new directions, with ideas I would never have considered. Many of his improvements have gone back upstream, and so you may benefit even if you don’t use w64devkit. I’d like to touch on the various odds and ends from the past year. Release security In April I announced that release packaging is now signed . Today...

I’m talking in the context of industrial programming . A few statements I believe to be true: If you aren’t doing it hands-on, your opinion about it is very likely to be completely wrong . Being influential doesn’t automatically make you right. Talking about coding and delivering software under real constraints are two very different things. Before clicking on a programming video, it doesn’t hurt to check the creator’s credentials. Yet we keep listening to influential p...

AI-generated text often carries invisible markers that most people never notice. These hidden watermarks — embedded by tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others — can flag your content as machine-produced, which matters if you’re publishing professionally, submitting academic work, or building a brand voice that needs to feel authentically human. Here’s how to find those markers and strip them out. What Are AI Watermarks and Why Do They Exist? AI watermarks aren’t visible...

Introducing composable, module system native and agent friendly command line tools for modern Java development By Danny Thomas, JVM Ecosystem Team Recent work on the Java language to pave the on-ramp has made it easier than ever to start a Java program and evolve it using the full language and platform. At the end of that on-ramp lies Java’s mature build and dependency management ecosystem, capable of carrying software to enormous scale and complexity. That ecosystem reached its maturity by ...

0.0 Context setting A really short one today (fine, maybe not, at over 1,200 words). It’s Wednesday 16 September in Portland, Oregon, where it’s unseasonably warm and it threatens to continue to do so through the end of the week. 0.1 How People Work, Live Last episode was with Dana Chisnell and we had a great candid chat about small-p politics at work. I especially loved her framing about how soft skills are actually power skills. Dana’s episode is up on the podcast and YouTube n...

Lately I've been playing classic World of Warcraft to get a feel for it and see if I like it before I try and go head-first into WoW Forever fairly blind with some friends. People have told me that World of Warcraft is good, but I haven't personally played it (or really any MMO outside of Final Fantasy 14). I've wanted to see for myself, so I dug in. I've been leveling an undead warlock and recently I've gotten my way to The Barrens. My goal was to kill some planestriders and collect...

I realised recently that I’ve spent the majority of my life living and working in places that start with S: Singapore Sydney San Francisco If I had a dollar for every place that began with S, I’d have three dollars. That’s more than two dollars. Makes you think, if you don’t think too hard. I’m now on a mission to collect other places that start with S. Off the top of my head, these are some more places I’d love to visit: Santiago Sapporo Seoul Shenyang Shen...

Back in June, I gave a keynote at the “Identiverse” conference about app and website authentication with a focus on passkeys. The talk touched on values, useful developments and tips for websites and apps, and an interesting story about open, standards-based collaboration. It borrows some from my earlier talk at FIDO’s Authenticate conference, but it’s tighter and more fun. If you’re interested in what I’ve been up to, give it a watch! YouTube Link Back in June, I gave a keynote...

Last winter I wrote a discrete event simulation framework in Python to keep myself busy, have something to put on my CV, experiment with LLM-assisted coding, and learn how async and await actually work. Over the summer, for similar reasons, I played around a bit with Lean and Gleam , thinking that I might translate the Software Design by Example books from JavaScript and Python into one or the other. Lean defeated me, and I quickly grew frustrated with the gaps in Gleam’s standa...

The following are my notes on discrete-time Fourier series (DTFS), as well as the discrete-time Fourier transform (DTFT). These topics serve as an important theoretical underpinning to the digital processing of signals by computers using the DFT (which will be covered in a future post). For discrete-time signals, we use the square bracket notation to denote samples: x[n] is the n-th sample of signal x . We’ll say that a discrete-time (just discrete from this point on, for brevity) sig...

Finding Bugs Sep 19, 2026 Are generative (randomized) tests significantly more effective than example-based unit-tests at discovering bugs? There’s an interesting discussion about this on lobste.rs . One argument in favor of unit tests is, paraphrasing My generic fuzzer wasn’t able to find this tricky bug in Rust regex crate. To me, it seems that generative testing should shake out that particular creature, so I wrote a lil fuzzer of my own, and it indeed discovere...

This blog is part of a series exploring the technologies and principles shaping the future of simulation. A program office asks a fair question about an autonomous aircraft. How will it learn to handle a specific threat, in a specific place, against a specific sensor picture, when its link to the operator drops? Not in a demonstration. In the conditions the mission will actually present. The honest answer is that the data required to teach that does not exist yet. That answer sits strangel...